Lesley Flanigan ITP

Sound as Place

Our sense of place is constructed by what we smell, see, touch, and what we hear. Sound is perceivable in 360 degrees of space around our physical bodies. Through hearing sound we can know and/or imagine that which we can not see, touch or smell. Sound gives us distance, extends context, and expands our reference of experience. Sound is the narrator of space.

We listen to sound through the tiny tunnels of our ears. It takes only one finger to close off these tunnels, severing our sonic dimension of perception. When we wear headphones, we close our ears to the immediate space around us, but we also open our ears to new space. We change our sense of place while we remain in the same physical location. This new place has no physical construct and no latitude and longitude. Headphones are hetertopias. Foucault coined the concept to describe a site linked to other spaces, while also in contradiction to those sites to which it is linked. A heterotopia is a real space, simultaneously mythic and real.

Headphones are doorways. They close you off to the surrounding world, while opening up a new world perceivable only through sound. As doorways, headphones are place. Like airports or train stations, their "placeness" is not significant in and of itself, but as a space between places. Between destinations.

Physical destinations around the world are known by their name, size, population, landscape, latitude and longitude, and by weather. My mother looks at the weather forecast for New York City everyday although she lives in Tampa. Knowing the weather of New York City gives her a sense of my place. By translating weather data from New York City into sound and sending that sound through headphones, you open a door to New York City.

Headphone Heterotopia
(A project with Gian Pablo Vilamill)

Headphone Heterotopia plays with how our sense of place is constructed by sound. With headphones, cities around the world can be heard through generative melodies based on current weather conditions (temperature, humidity, wind direction, length of day, etc).

Using a php url scrapper to parse data from online weather sources (www.pxweather.abbett.org does all the work of retrieving, parsing and organizing weather data into xml for you!), we call and retrieve weather data through a Lantronix Xport (serial to Ethernet module), and send the resulting numeric data to Arduino. Arduino translates this numeric data into midi values and plays back a corresponding musical sequence. Gian Pablo has done great work developing a circuit that produces musical sounds from Arduino using simple voltage-controlled oscillators and the AD5206 digital pot. With this general set up, we can map weather to music. For example, temperature values could be the frequency range of notes, length of day could be the length of melody, wind direction could effect panning, and other weather variables (humidity, heat index, uv index, etc) could effect envelope parameters (attack, sustain, decay, and release).

Technical documentation will be posted as the project develops.

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In general, I think about what it means to be human.

I think about:
Layers (creating complexity)
Circles (strange loops)
Space between (relationships)
Narratives (non linear, recursive, experiences)
Identity (self, human, sum of all our memories)
Emotion (feeling, sympathy, empathy, larger than ourselves)
Communication (sharing, understanding, relating, learning)
Cognition (process information, reasoning, reception, engaged, curious)
Meaning (interpretation, personal)
Lyrics (words, music, rhythm, expressiveness)
Systems (balance, symmetry, dependency)
Intuition (stream of conscious action from where the Self in secret lies)
Myths (personal, understanding through the stories we live to tell, magic )
Sets (intersections, spaces within spaces)
Context (comprehend meaning through relationships)
Simplicity (creating complexity, embracing)
Complication (creating complexity, fighting)
Mystery (we can not know everything…)
Beauty (beauty in the balanced, chaotic and mundane)

These thoughts (and much, much more) live and resonate in the spaces between people.

We know what it means to be human through our relationships with other people…
-Relationships between strangers
-Relationships between friends
-Relationships between lovers
-Relationships between enemies
-Relationships between family
-Relationships between children
-Relationships between few and among many

In this space, we ask question such as these:
-do we ever really know another person?
-do we ever really know ourselves?
-can we know ourselves without trying to know another person?
-can we ever really know ourselves without another person trying to know us?
I know you know I know you know I know you I know I know you know I know you know …

These are big unanswerable questions, but they are not unexplorable.

Recently, I have been exploring these themes of relationship space and communication through kinetic objects. These objects can be viewed here.

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"Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art." -- Heidegger

I want to investigate what it means to make objects that move, especially objects that move an invisible space between people.

Completed objects can be found at seseyann.com/objects.

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Whyte’s essay “The Design of Spaces” observes and categorizes the common patterns of people in urban public spaces. A flaneur-inspired approach, his essay highlights and embraces the significance of banal human behaviors within the context of an ever changing modern society. In contrast to the tourist for whom sightseeing is a form of ritual, the flaneur seeks out the process of seeing for its own sake, bypassing the obvious official highlights of city in favor of its darker and dirtier reality. Whyte monitors the sitting patterns, standing patterns, group geometry, distances, and small talk of various public gathering spaces. His viewing paints a picture much like an Impressionist painting, creating a snap shot of a bustling scene, “Looking down on a bare plaza, one sees a display of geometry, done almost in monochrome. Down at eye level the scene comes alive with movement and color – people walking quickly, walking slowly, skipping up steps, weaving in and out on crossing patterns…There is a beauty that is beguiling to watch, and one senses that the players are quite aware of this themselves. You can see this in the way they arrange themselves on ledges and steps…With its brown-gray setting, Seagram is the best stages – in the rain, too, when an umbrella or two puts spots of color in the right places, like Corot’s red dots.” (486) This scene is visually reminiscent of Renior’s “The Unbrellas,” reinstating the conceptual power Impressionism had during its time. When inventions such as the steam engine, power loom, streetlights, camera, ready-made fashions, cast iron, and steel were changing the lives of ordinary people, Impressionism took interest in seeing the world through the effect of man’s presence rather than its technologies -- knowing places through the context of man’s action within the space.

Public space is produced through the balancing of dominant and subordinate spatial understanding. Institutions strategically manufacture places, centers of power (like corporate plazas), and people subvert these places to create individual spaces. These tactics of everyday people in public spaces is what Certeau described, in The Practice of Everyday Life, as a 'spatial practice.' Skateboarding is and example of "a certain play within a system of defined places" (106). As a public space becomes authoritarian, skateboarding "'authorizes' the production of an area of free play on a checkerboard that analyzes and classifies identities. It makes places habitable" (106). A skateboarder is like an impressionist painter. As a flaneur, a skateboarder wanders the city according to no set route or schedule, riding the surface of the outdoor landscape engaging the solitary bench in an ollie. Skateboarding illustrates the distinction and relationships between strategies and tactics, public spaces and private people. The spaces skateboarders occupy are typically underused or scripted for use only by office workers and tourists. While Whyte criticizes the open corporate spaces that alienate the public they supposedly serve, with benches that “are design artifacts the purpose of which is to punctuate architectural photographs” (489), these are very spaces skateboarders are drawn to. They find a way to put the bench and the wide open space to public use, repurposing the landscape and reclaiming the public sphere symbolically for the underrepresented such as children, homeless, elderly, and drug dealers.

Skateboarders also work on the notion of time. In the same way the impressionist painter captures a moment in time, often sketching out light and color differences, skateboarders ride the rhythm of the city. They are in tune with the micro experience, the rhythm analysis as Ian Borden describes as “the relation of the self to the city’s physical minutiae that are not always obvious to, or considered by, the dominant visualization of the city on which we most commonly depend.” (10) Skateboarders feel the streets, the clicking cracks under the wheels ticking the time down blocks through intersections. A full body, sensory experience of sound, sights, and physical energy, skateboarding is an aggressive meeting with the landscape. Skateboarders test the “public” aspects of public architecture in their process of spatial observation, action, and seeking of the physical possibilities. They perform as context – negotiating and conversing with the public space they enter. Neither dominant or submissive, or activist or pedestrian, skateboarders are still simply flaneurs.

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In response to Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life
Chapters 7, Walking in the City and 9, Spatial Stories

Everyday understanding is managed by speculative and sorting operations. These operations take place in metaphorical and physical space. As physical beings, we are set apart from the world by the surface of our skin. We meet the world in terms of inside and outside. We come to know the world as if we are containers, accepting a continuous stream of information through our senses, the highlights of which are mixed with memories and blended with experience to be contextualized and finally sealed with meaning. Inside, our bodies hold a visceral knowledge of everyday life through our process of receiving the outside world. We comprehend this knowledge through metaphor.

Spatial metaphors are grounding concepts upon which people build all other concepts to understand life. Life is comprised of our relationships with the world through places, people, objects, time, memories, and reflexively ourselves. When we speak of relationships, we are referencing the space between. We are acknowledging an inside and outside, a here and there, the above and below. We instinctually classify and categorize the layers of daily experience through a system of spatial metaphors so incredibly dense that to break down that information, to try to view the contents as they are and see them without their implicit relationships, is impossible. The universe is like a matryoshka doll. Our brains work faster than our consciousness and we simply can not understand the universe without understanding space.

Certeau approaches our everyday understanding through the spatial set theories of a city. He begins above the city of New York, in the sky of the World Trade Center. From this vantage point, he takes a snapshot of life below, a neat package of order, and contemplates the “pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts.” (92) The joy in this view is that from a single perspective, the complexity of the city is made readable. We clearly see a map, the structure, the design of life in the city. We can follow the circulatory system of economic, political, and social structure up and down the avenues. We see not individuals, but masses of dots moving in rhythm, even car horns faintly heard are in time with the rhythm. The city, indeed, has a unifying pulse – just like the universe. But the universe, life, and the city are not this simple, they are complex. Complexity lies somewhere between order and chaos. It is at this point, we fall back down into the pulse of the city and as parts of the whole, walk through everyday life.

Pedestrians simultaneously read and write the city like text. As readers and writers, they walk paths of “unrecognizable poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, [and] elude legibility.” (93) On the ground, there is no single map. People weave together in subjective ways, existing in spaces translated uniquely for each person and shaped by each. Certeau uses linguistic concepts such as rhetoric, enunciation, and semantics to capture this process of shaping and translation. In a sense, people walk narratives writing sentences upon sentences. Which roads we choose to walk hold in our wake the history of a decision with the content of an action. We enunciate the topography of landscape, transform the signifiers of direction, and insert the “social models, cultural mores, and personal factors” (101) of rhetoric. We walk poems, intuitively processing the perceptual chaos of the world around us writing into it the spatial metaphors of continuous interrelations. As our bodies move, the physical reality of our skin defines the inside/outside, here/there, and above/below of space, ultimately dictating our consciousness, woven by personal narratives of understanding. Simple metaphors build our reality, keeping us sane.

Making things look simple is not easy, because simplicity requires clarity and clarity requires depth. Good art is full of mystery -- secret layers of depth that in a single moment resonate with complexity between the banality of order and madness of chaos that is life. Good art grows with time and transcends static meaning because it too is informed by relationships. Good art is like the view from the Certeau’s sky; it both speaks of and is part of the matryoshka doll universe. Anthony McCall’s light projection, You and I, Horizontal (III), offers insight into this idea. Using a pair of three-dimensional forms of ‘solid light,’ each thirty-five feet long, projected side by side, McCall’s installation cuts, divides, shapes, and changes visual space. One feels like he or she is walking through walls, both omnipresent and contained in a single experience. Light shines upon the natural relationships of our bodies to air, people, objects and all we can not see or ever hope to know. You and I, Horizontal (III) embodies concepts filled with life experiences and expresses them in metaphor -- clean, fundamental constructions of space. The layers, subsets, and categories are there and need not be said, only felt.

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People walk through New York City with headphones on. Navigating the crowded streets of cars, people, advertisements, posters, shops, restaurants, television displays, lights, noise, dirt, steam, trees, animals, garbage, construction and decay, they walk alone occupying a private space within the public sphere. This private space is marked by sound emanating from headphones which only the user can hear. The sound compliments their living experience, blanketing the immediacy of the physical environment with a personal layer of thoughts, memories, associations, juxtapositions, and projections.

Interpreting our environment is a sensorial experience mixing sights, sounds, smells, and touch. We live in a visually dominated culture because sight is more easily manipulated for messaging. Urban experience is a bombardment of visual spectacle sending us massive amounts of information in such dense layers that we are often unaware of how we filter and interpret the saturated content. The information barrage is accepted as part of the public experience. Consider the sounds that assist these messages in their context -- sounds of the car horns with the piercing bird-like screams of young girls outside of MTV Studios in Times Square playing as a soundtrack for the visual glitz of massive lights and billboard advertisements, or the crack of baseball bats hitting balls and barking of small dogs in Central Park as a soundtrack for the hotdog stand. Spaces are interpreted through the blending of sight and sound.

Headphones let us customize public space with controllable, private sound. The visuals in a public environment remain the same, but with the introduction of a personal soundtrack, the context of the shared images change. Take for example, riding a subway train. This mundane experience of observing the wallpapering of Budweiser commercials, crowds of sullen faces, and the occasional vagabond delivering a speech, becomes an entirely new interpretive experience while contextualized with soprano Maria Callas singing Ave Maria. Depending on the style of headphones or volume level, different amounts of external sound may leak into the private music experience, mixing the content both of the song and public space.

As small plastic objects, headphones nestle close or sometimes inside our ears, cutting out extraneous noise. We “plug in” to our portable audio device, separating ourselves from the sounds of the external world as we move through from one environment to the next. While headphones isolate us, they simultaneously open the world in new interpretive ways. A schizophrenic experience is created as the user occupies two spaces at once, building an entirely new psychological environment composed of the private and public space. Combinatorial in creating meaning, headphones’ designed portability move the personal sound space through various physical spaces weaving intersections of layered interpretation and thought. Included in these intersections are the users’ own memories and personal relationships to the songs, constructing even deeper meaning and subtext within the physical environment. Listening to a certain song that reminds you of a past lover while walking to meet a stranger for a date might flood your thoughts with new, complicated emotions and questions that would otherwise have remained unexamined.

Headphone space is not only auditory and invisible. Headphones are visible and physical objects. The sound emanating from them may be a private experience for the user, but seen by other people, headphones communicate a “do not disturb” message, like a sign on the door of a hotel room. They delineate a clear line of private space within the public space. The user of the headphones is socially excused from listening regardless of whether or not they can hear what is happening outside of the headphone space. In fact, headphones are often worn to create the illusion of separation in order to avoid human interaction or information responsibility. People choose when and where to symbolically excuse themselves by putting on their headphones, and also manipulate (perhaps secretively) the levels of their isolation through volume control. Although interpretation of environments may be unintentional, the decisions to appear absent are always intentional. Headphones are socially recognized private spaces.

There are many provocative ways to use headphone space as a site to explore themes of personal vs shared and private vs public space while probing its inherent intersections of layered space. Consider the concepts of intimacy that result from sharing a headphone space, perhaps the same set of headphones worn simultaneously by two or even one hundred people; or concepts of manipulation and ownership if a set of headphones are controlled not by its user, but rather by an audience. Art and design projects exploring headphone space include Alice Wang’s Peer Pressure, Michelle Rosenberg’s Dynamic Headphones series, Paul Davies’ The Prayer Antenna, and Cre8tive Challenge’s Echo Ricochet, just to name a few. Headphone space is rich with content and metaphor. As the technological and aesthetic design of headphones advance, more complex relationships with these objects are sure emerge as the space grows denser with human experience and meaning.

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Tom Jenkins and I have been talking a lot about Dunne and Raby’s design noir and Wodiczko’s objects as critical designs. We gave a presentation on Monday that outlined a lot of our thoughts on the topic, available here.

Projects mentioned during the presentation:
Dunne and Raby’s Placebo Project:

Wodiczko’s Disarmor Project:

and his Personal Instrument:

radio scanner as reappropriation of the everyday into a noir aesthetic:

An excellent essay covering our thoughts on Hertzian space as site can be found here on Tom's blog.

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“The ‘invisible’ space of electronic data flows as substance rather than just as a void – something that needs a structure, a politics, and a poetics.”

With this statement, Lev Manovich ends his essay “The Poetics of Augmented Space.” All the readings for this week were fantastic and without conclusion. Aware of the momentum of information, communication, experience, and relationships influenced by electronic media, Manovich and Kruger tackle the missing meaning behind the momentum of a seemingly chaotic digital culture. We truly are in new conceptual territory with this experiential space, sharing our individual thoughts and instincts through philosophically infinite air. This space is an invisible dimension full of humanity and yet its physical translations lack human poetics. Why?

To begin to understand why poetry lacking in our understanding and depictions of technological spaces, we need to assess how we describe those spaces in the first place. One word habitually used in the essays to describe what makes the technological media so rich is “dynamic.” The term “dynamic” alludes to characteristics of energy: time, change, layers, range, force and speed. The first image to pop in my mind is the Sony Centre at Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, a large public building that is architecturally futuristic and visually layered with motion graphics, plasma screen videos, lighting effects and projections. It is also economically filled with businesses and socially filled with pedestrians. It is a dynamic space – a dense, layered microcosm of capitalist culture. The invisible technological spaces we are trying to understand certainly have dynamic qualities, but to consistently use “dynamic” as a guideline for expressing and analyzing new media semantically limits our imagination as we investigate the content qualities of that space. Dynamic is energy, not content. Although content can be dynamic, dynamic is not content. Something dynamic is a spectacle, which is often a distraction.

Distraction is part of the new technological, cultural experience. Distractions are not necessarily bad. They can assist creativity and inspire intellectual travel down unforeseen paths, but on the flip side, distractions hinder the quality of focused thinking. The greatest distraction with current technology is ironically information. The word “information” implies intelligence, interest and engagement, yet in the context of information gathering and dispersing today, information quickly ceases to be informative. We click around the internet, instantly connecting the disparate thoughts in our minds. In one sitting we can search for word definitions, read technical data, IM with friends, watch funny videos, download software, listening to songs by an obscure band, read a bio about that band while checking out other bands that influenced their sound – we run a non stop line of segmented points splitting directions, looping several circles and hopefully ending with substance. I repeat, distractions are not necessarily bad. It is amazing how much information people are capable of absorbing at one time. But if the information interface is designed as “distraction” then the content of that information is likely lost. The content of that densely layered, distracted information is questionable. If the content is weak we become accustomed to disposable knowledge. We become accustomed to information as fetishized and visualized through dynamic media – flashy, layered and empty. Beyond media, we see the present-day dynamic person as someone with tons of useless information. Our culture embraces information for quantity’s sake. It is noise.

Technological space is not just noise. Sure, there is much noise, but that is because it is full of life. The challenge is going deeper beyond the obvious spectacles of visual dynamics and distracted information. The poetry of augmented space exists in the invisible data space, not the entrance devices. Poetry implies intuitiveness, ambiguity and interpretation. We should take these words to heart and focus on the abstract connections being made between people within the invisible space. Critical analysis of the activity within this space will inform our understanding how to connect with it on a physical scale through architecture, industrial design, and graphic design, as well as in the form of artistic expression. I do not think this analysis will be easy, but I sense the poetry that is lost is simply the poetry that is not being read – and is there.

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THE EXPANSION OF SPACE

The central idea that I returned to while reading the three essays for this week is the expansion of category, definition, and interpretation. It is human nature to challenge labels and expectations. As much as we are creatures of habit and as groups tend to resist change in favor of traditional comfort, questioning authority is still instinctual. Such questioning begins on the intellectual “wordy” level. In politics, we see these ideas played out theatrically in speeches and subversively in campaign strategies. In art we play the game of semantics and watch the ideas manifest themselves visually. There is always room for expansion because we can manipulate “wordy” definitions to fit our motivations. The tricky part is convincing others still stuck in the group-think of comfort and tradition.

Site specificity is the main idea being explored and expanded upon in the readings. Taking a historical approach to understanding how and why the term “site specific” exists today, Rosalind Krauss retraces Western sculpture as “commemorative representation” in the form of a monument. For example, Bernini’s Conversion of Constantine at the foot of the Vatican stairway in St. Peter’s Basilica is a monument marking a “particular place for specific meaning/event” (33). Sculpture, painting and drawing all historically found content in narrative form within a particular place and time. Religion was certainly the most influential (and profitable) source of content. By the end of the 19th century, people’s relationship to authority in religion, politics, and science was challenged. This challenge is reflected in the Modern Art movement where artists sought an “idealist space to explore, a domain cut off from the project of temporal and spatial representation” (34). Seeking to create work and explore ideas without the commissioned content of authority, the logical, physical place of “monument” was lost in abstract intellectual space. Physically, the work was homeless. The absence of a specific place highlighted the role of context in understanding meaning. There is a codependent relationship between space and context that influences a viewer’s perception of content.

Artists of the 1960s began to explore the role of context through site specificity. James Meyer delineates two main categories for “site”: literal site and functional site. In a literal site the artist conforms to a given physical space, and so by “reflecting a perception of the site as unique, the work is itself ‘unique.’ It is thus a kind of monument, public work commissioned for the site” (24). In a functional site, the definition of site expands to include non-physical space. A functional site marks a process, a “movement, a chain of meanings and imbricated histories: a place marked and swiftly abandoned” (p 25). The category of “functional site” is infinite because it reaches out to include anything contextual -- not just the physical space but mental space. Context is embedded in every object through the means of history, culture, place, and relationships. Context fundamentally dictates our perception of content (and reality), and embracing this idea philosophically introduces a phenomenological model of meaning in art. Art can no longer be made without consideration of the “space” the art occupies.

Space itself is nothing except that which is defined by a boundary. By marking a boundary (physical, mental, time-based, emotional, mathematical, etc), you have a “space” between. In marking a boundary, you name a place. In naming a place to work, you choose a site to work in. In choosing a site to work in, you are being site specific. Ultimately, if context is always the defining point of meaning in art, and context is a result of “space,” is all art work site specific? No. The term site specific does not need to be expanded, it needs to be narrowed. The expansionist play on the intellectual semantics of site specificity should end with the word “specific.” Terms that can and should be broadened are context and space – because they always exist. Whether an artist wishes to acknowledge the role of space and its subsequent contexts (and subsequent interpretive meanings) in his or her work is inconsequential because the space itself is inescapable. Such work must acknowledge a basic flux in content interpretation that is inherent to physical and temporal mobility, but does not need to box itself into a specific time and place to be appreciated. However, for the artist who wants define the physical and temporal spatial boundaries of his or her work and specify its relationship to the ideas being explored, the work becomes site specific through intention. I doubt that Richard Serra ever really considered his “Tilted Arc” to be site specific until he was challenged with its removal from the Federal Plaza. This shift in Serra’s original intention does not belittle the work’s conceptual significance as contingent upon the space it occupies, but does shine a light on the fine line between the categories of inherent spatial context vs. site specificity.

As an idea born out of the notion of homelessness, site specificity is brilliant. It is the type of idea that makes us reexamine history to inform our contemporary perception of reality. There is no escaping the notion that our interpretation of content is dependent on context which is shaped by space. The intellectual expansion of “space” as a concept is fantastically broad and will continue to inspire new meanings in the future. I am particularly fascinated by Kwon’s thoughts on our current culture’s ideology of “ ‘freedom of choice’ – the choice to forget, the choice to reinvent, the choice to fictionalize, the choice to belong anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere” (57). In our exploration of conceptual space, new spaces are being developed – with few obvious physical boundaries. Internet and cell phone technology are two obvious examples of new spaces dense with sub-layers of virtual, physical and communicative space. Developing these new spaces, our current technologic culture is not only challenging the labels and expectations of technology, but is also playing with throwing out all the rules and creating a new sense of interpretive homelessness in the idea of “freedom.” New art that seeks to find itself within this current content-rich space will be determining a new specific site.

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Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture In The Expanded Field
James Meyers, The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity
Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another

The definition(s) of space.
The definition(s) of context
The definition(s) of site
The definition(s) of specific

The word "displaced" is used many times in all these readings. Homelessness, Placelessness,

KRAUSS
People always want to challenge labels. Few want to be what they are.

"covert message of historicism -- the new is made comfortable by being familar (gradually evolved from forms of the past)."

"We are comforted by this perception of sameness -- reducing anything foreign in either time or space."

We interpret the world through our memories -- our experiences. Our SELVES. As we communicate these interpretations, they become collective consciousness.

we like to categorize -- allocate. museums. collections. "The rage to historicize"

What is sculpture traditionally? What is traditional?

Sculpture is a commemorative representation -- art is representation.

Traditional definition of Sculpture began with the monument? Venus of Willendorf as monument? representation?

Modern art, 19th century, displaces the monument -- enter the gallery, which becomes monumental housing. Sculptural production operating in relation to the loss of site -- abstracted monuments. LOSS OF PLACE.

The David was site specific. All work is related to space in some way....context.

modernist sculpture as nomadic - in terms of abstract ideas. abstract ideas can travel with the mind. awareness of self in its material/construction process. modernist sculpture had an IDEALIST SPACE to explore cut off from time and space representation.

SPACE (mental) vs SITE (physical) -- inform each other

Art happens in the spaces between -- the contradictions, the dialog, the synthesis.

Intention of the artist = DESIGN = sculptural == physical aesthetic
ART = sculptural == physical representation

The idea of site specific art was born out of homelessness...nomadic...photography...loss of monument in the traditional form ---- POSTMODERN

Not about redefining scultpure, or even about expanding the category -- more about creating a NEW CATEGORY. wait, no. There does not need to be a new category -- I think site exists no matter what the art. It is about acknowledging its existence in the creation of context which always informs the work. And understanding it is transient. We must allow the adjustments to meaning in the context in history, place, culture, etc. Fixed meaning has NEVER EXISTED. only documentation of what it once was. Some examples are more obvious than others, therefore the dialog of site specificity becomes more inherent/valid/significant.

sculpture is merely and art process -- painting, photography, printmaking, etc can all be looked at in regards to site specificity. SITE SPECIFIC IS AN IDEA.

Culture of choice -- century of self -- postmoderism. Site specificity makes us look at ourselves to understand/create/interpret meaning. What is MY relationship to this object, in this space? How does the object's space influence MY interpretation of it?

MEYER

It makes sense to document, analyze and critique HISTORY/historical events using site -- history is literally site specific.

We have the modern critic as a result of homelessness of art -- they engage viewers in understanding the context of the work art from which a dialog takes place. Often, not straightforward anymore. No longer just illustrations of an obvious theme (like religious commissioned art -- although much of that work was densely layered in symbolic content....blah blah blah...not talking about now)

Literal site vs. Functional site

Literal site: artist conforms to SPACE ("reflecting a perception of the site as unique, the work is itself 'unique.' It is a kind of MONUMENT, a public work commissioned for the site.")

Functional site: PLACE is marked and quickly abandoned. May or may not involve physical SPACE.

"To begin with, site specificity was understood, in its very constitution, as a mode of refusal of the system of art's commodification. Locating its critique within the gallery or museum, the site specific work exposed this SPACE AS A MATERIAL ENTITY, a no longer neutral space." -- Of course, that space remains NOT neutral. It embraces and sells site specific work.. Were the artists ever really in opposition of the gallery, or just challenging how to make the gallery work for them? Christo & Jean Claude -- work out side gallery, nbut represented by a gallery and sell sketches through gallery.

Ideas of placelessness...again.

idea of modern art -- object in and of itself with transhistorical meaning -- not associated with time or space. Objects then able to be commodified -- which led to a CALL FOR PRESENCE (demand for "being there") -- particular space, particular time. Origins of site specificity in minimalism. -- object's relation to site produced meaning.

site within site -- categories, labels.

"Today, much practice explores an EXPANDED SITE, enlarging its scop of inquiry into contingent spheres of interest, contingent locations."

Meeting of producer and site -- artist subscribes his/her subjectivity into the work. Fixed identities blur.

MOBILE SITE -- happenings, situationism -- Site/ non site -- Smithson (Jetty as monument thoughts of church, religion, construction, massive, destructive, glorious) -- an in-between, a non place, a ruin.

Site is really just context -- control of CONTEXT!

KWON

The SPACE of art.

Site specific art gives itself up to it's environmental context.

Aspiration to exceed the limitations of traditional media led to challenging the location of meaning from within the art object to the contingencies of its context. Independent (Cartesian) to Dependent (Phenomenological) -- capitalist market economy (exchange of goods/objects) is challenged.

Contextual thinking of minimalism (1960s, 70s?)

Site is there whether you wish to acknowledge it or not.

SITE vs. SITE SPECIFIC -- always a site, but to be specific is to bring awareness to the site/space

site specific art is passive... gives itself up to the environment. hmmmm.

specific within site within place within space. -(--semantics?)

concurrent with the dematerialization of the site is the ongoing deaestheticization and dematerialization of the artwork. Aggressively ANTI VISUAL. Art "WORK" no longer as noun/object -- site refers to ideological conditions for viewing. THis context, site is not based on physical permanence, but on recognition of unfixed impermanence. This is how view site specificity.

location as site and social conditions (institutional frame) as site both subordinate to discursively determined site.

there are often several definitions of site at work -- several different layers, OF COURSE.

semantic slippage between content and site. ha!

PHYSICAL SITE vs DISCURSIVE SITE -- action vs reception/effect (still need the physical to inform, instigate the mental.) -- all ideas start at a physical layer. Consider the process of critiquing anything -- 1. FORMAL (physical viewing) + 2. CONTEXT (time, space, history, culture) =3. MEANING (how the form and context create content -- personal to the viewer and universal to the world).

site is now structured (inter)textually rather than spatially.

3 paradigms of site specificity outlined: 1. phenomenological 2. social/institutional 3. Discursive

literal sense of physical separation, metaphorical sense as performed in discursive mobilization of site.

Site specific -- internet/music?

Artist as Producer of site specific work -- role of PRODUCER. Content maker. Progenitor of MEANING.

renewed focus on the artist leads to a hermetic implosion of auto biographical and subjectivist indulgences and myopic narcissism is misrepresented as self-reflexivity. --- SITE AND IDENTITY.

"The elaboration of place bound indentities has become more rater than less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement and communication," -- What is the definition of SPACE now?

Order of space.

uniqueness of place - establishing authenticity of meaning, memory, histories, identities -- different functions of place.

we leave behind the empirical and physical realities of a place -- no longer bound to these places. Contemporary life is a network of unanchored flows -- back to homelessness. NOMADS

The phantom of a site as an actual place remains, and out psychic,l habitual attachments to places regularyreturn as they continue to inform our sense of identity.

PARADOX OF CHOICE. "Freedon of Choice" -- choice to belong anywhere, everywhere, noware.

Our contemporary capitalist culture encourages the "self" identity in objects/products. But w/ technology there is a displacement of this self -- self is also determined by space. Our space is fragmented in the internet -- (and often false? -- MySpace.com), the new commerce. Selling of out internet identity.

passing intimacies. I like that line.

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SPACE OF SELF

Thinking about the context of space and how it informs objects, peoples, memories, and time, it is easy to get lost in the dense layers and intersections of meaning. Where does one space end and another begin? What is space physically, mentally, socially and in representation? These questions are explored in site specific art. However, I believe that as we consider these ideas, we instinctually conclude that understanding site specificity is a way of interpreting our relationship with the world around us. We can understand different modes of “self” through the awareness of our own personal space and site specificity.

Valparaiso is dense with spatial layers. On the surface layer, we have a story about a business man taking an accidental flight across the world and then living through the public fame he receives as a result. The site of the play is a theater. The site of the story is in a living room, an office, and on a television set. The site of memories is an airport, plane, car, bedroom, kitchen, and motel. Spaces include the intimate spaces between characters, the invisible spaces with the public audience, the technological spaces of television, sound, and video, and the personal spaces of solitude. These spaces and more weave in and out of each other creating the psychological world and resulting identity of the main character, Michael Majeski.

I like to consider Michael’s identity as folk art. In the same way Ferdinand Cheval built his elaborate Palais Ideal around a simple rock he found, showing how “A single site-specific found element becomes the catalyst for constructing an environmentally all-encompassing, self-reflexive, and multi-focused work.” (Suderburg 11), Michael builds his identity around an odd travel experience. Both naïve to the cultural/philosophical ramifications of communications technology and welcoming of the false stamp of legitimacy offered by fame, he embraces the invisible public’s “need to know” about his travel experience and personal life history. In the telling and retelling of his mundane story, he builds an extensive public identity that reaches out across the atmosphere through radio and television networks. His public identity is site-specific. It originated in the sky on a plane and continues to exist in the temporal space of communication air waves. His public identity is abstract, fleeting, and missing a good honest chunk of his personal identity. He revels in the newness and freshness of his public identity, but it gradually shifts and destabilizes as the layers of public and private space it occupies intersect to become more complicated.

Michael’s fabricated identity performs as it moves through these spaces. Analyzing the performances of The Gutai group, Suderburg remarks on “… reconfiguring the space of art-making through bodily interventions and spatial dissembling. The artist is implicated in the work of art, as he or she becomes content, material, and process.” (p.13) Viewed as a performer, Michael becomes abstract content, material, and process. The retelling of his story as a script, the stage directions of his interviewers, the shifting narrative sequence of events, all add up to the absence of substance. His performance is his words, his words shape his identity, but the words mean nothing. Near the end of the story, he holds no control or jurisdiction over his identity (and sub sequentially his life) which he hands freely over to the public. He is living art through his own verbal dissembling.

Is it possible for us to occupy more than one space at a time and be true to ourselves? Or are we constantly negotiating the different selves we have allocated to different spaces? These are not questions either reading brought up, but when discussing the nature of site-specificity in terms of self identity, it seems we are already assuming that one self can only exist in one particular space. Michael did not want to return to the self identity he had before his flight to Valparaiso. That self was lonely and destroyed. However, as the public space of his post-Valparaiso self began intersect with the private space of his pre-Valparaiso self, he could not blend/balance himself into one person. He performed with his disconnected selves using words while passing through disjointed mental, physical, and social spaces, inevitably beating himself into falsehood, isolation and death. And in the imaginary world of this play, his public identity continues to exist and fluctuate within the electrical currents of technological space.

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Valparaiso, Don DeLillo
Introduction: On Installation and Site Specificity, Erika Suderburg

The following are some thoughts I had while reading in regards to topics of site specificity. If I am to sum up what I see as the common theme between the two texts, I'd say that "space" (both theoretical and physical) is built and witnessed though intersections. It is at these intersections that real critical dialog takes place.

SUDERBURG

Are we always sensitive to our surroundings?

site vs. scene vs. location vs. space

What is SPACE? What does it consist of? Mental Space (philosophy, math, geometry, linguistics, thought), Physical Space (lived experience, senses, perception), Social Space (habits, routines, rituals, politics, public, private, relationship, communication, internet -- virtual networks), Representational Space (image of the world, photograph of a room), Representation OF Space (art -- painting, sculpture, installation).

Site Specificity is making a point in a designated area. A FOCAL POINT.

Site Specific began with photography perhaps? In capturing the real world environment, the photographer had to make a choice of what he/she was capturing. The reality of it. What story is being told in the space.

Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, Land Art -- all tied together to create/interpret Site Specific concepts. 1970s I think?

Duchamp = awesome.

Joseph Kosuth (?) the chair piece...One and Three Chairs (I think?) -- in exploring ideas of identity, he also explores context, hence themes of "site specificity." --reflection, interpretation, physical, mental, and representational space.

Mirrors. Mirror as physical and as reflection -- concept and abstraction. mirror as dialectic (employed in investigating the truth of a theory or opinion).

Video as mirrors -- or really, any recording. the projected image played a critical role in a new language or representation, as artists used film, slides, video and photographic projection to measure, document, abstract, reflect and transform the parameters of physical space.

memory changes with time -- reimagine place. reinterpret POV. Site is transient.

VALPARAISO:

Theater -- the intersection of architecture and performance -- site is the stage, space is the narrative

story is told after the event

set is one place, story is three places, story is told to millions (imaginary millions, thousands of cities) day and night over and indefinite period of time

layers of space --
space of the home, space of the plane, space of the flight (air, empty), space of the TV (also air, also empty). space around people, space between characters (especially sexual -- do they even know each other?), mental space -- "tell us more, we need to know more, we have to know everything,"

twin journeys -- geographic and public.

spiral into descent where layers of systems splice identity and randomly scatter it into a thousand sound bytes.

the play is recursive. "but first, take us back..." Incantation, habit, falsehood, repetition

talk is performance

invasion of the media both encouraged and wanted by its victims.

WORDS -- a thirsty world for words. "And we have words. Endless melting words. Words spoken expressly to be forgotten." p.91

The play begins wordless. the play ends wordless. 2 hours of banter and flashy vernacular all becomes WORDLESS again. he is murdered.

fate of individual in media saturated society.

media consumes citizen. he is murdered.

What is the modern meaning of life's end? when, how? what is life's value? (ehhh...stopping that train of thought)

public attention gives the mundane life new relevance. but also adds unhealthy vulnerability -- main character loses control and jurisdiction over his life.

Arte Povera -- I think this play has many some qualities of Arte Povera work. Metaphorical imagery culled from contemporary life, idealism about the redemptive power of history and art with a solid grounding in the material world -- clash/reconciliation of opposites as a source of poignancy.

Because somehow, through the "mirror" of video, we look at others and judge ourselves as missing something. -- video can be edited, pov skewed, memory altered to create fiction out of what is sold as reality. "Then you know. How some people manage to live so dynamically. It's a mystery to me how this happens." (p.45)

"we deeply need to know"

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